Growth cannot be siloed featuring Tymur Donets

AI-Generated Summary

Tymur Donets, a seasoned Growth PM and experimentation consultant, shared some powerful insights during his Experiment Nation talk. Here are five key takeaways: Growth PMs are holistic: Don’t be siloed! Growth PMs work across the entire customer journey, ensuring marketing and product teams are aligned. Commercial awareness is key: Both Growth PMs and CROs must understand the business impact of their work and how it contributes to the bottom line. Empathy is vital: CROs need to understand the pressures their PM colleagues face and proactively offer support. Leverage your expertise: If you’re a CRO, consider specializing in Growth PM to expand your impact and skillset. Transparency is key: Clear communication between teams helps everyone understand their roles and collaborate effectively.

Audio

AI-Generated Transcript

(00:00) collaborate with each other but um I think there is a lot of quite quite a lot of misunderstanding of like who does what you know and what exactly are are those guys are doing and usually everyone’s just so stuck in their jobs and like overwhelmed and stretched that you just don’t have like time or mental

(00:14) capacity to really figure out what this person even is talking about right so I think um being like really transparent somehow concise right and also understanding way better what this other person might care about and bringing that exact thing I [Music] think hey Tim thanks for joining the episode today hi hi Tracy it’s nice to

(00:44) be here yeah of course so I noticed the other day you have growth PM in your LinkedIn headline and I’ve personally been asked so many times what is a growth PM it’s I don’t know if it’s like region specific this language but I know you also identify as a cro an experimentation consultant like myself

(01:08) so please like demystify the growth PM what is a growth PM how is it different from an experimentor or just a product manager all right sure yeah absolutely um so I think the first time I learned or like heard about this term it was um or still is an article at on reforge um talking about the growing specialization

(01:34) of product managers that you know the the job is on the market for quite a while and people started kind of going into all these different direction and that they in fact they exist right so not all PMS are created equal and not all product management jobs are equal and so how this article describes kind

(01:52) of the the Growth work right is more something that creat creates and captures value by capturing more of the existing Market M right so when we when we look at all the different so there let’s say there are core PMS that are actually developing feature of a product but then as a growth PM you are rather a

(02:12) person that before this feature has even built you are asking the question well how are customers supposed to know that it’s there how they’re supposed to find it how their journey is looking like to be using this feature right and usually you’re working with the user let’s say or customers that’s that are already

(02:30) there and and this job in general is has a lot of overlap with C is is very heavily based on rapid experimentation on doing a lot of user research and understanding user needs right and but the the main thing is that you’re not so much developing new features as much as you’re kind of making sure that the on

(02:51) that already there actually get the usage and get noticed totally so I think yeah that’s it’s like a brief explanation I would say awesome and I as like in a past life someone who did identify as growth PM there was always this idea of a growth PM focuses on like a very specific metric whereas a product

(03:13) manager is focusing on shipping releases all of these other kinds of like features is it fair to say that a growth PM is a little bit more metric oriented well I mean you would find it normally in in product companies all of the PMS would be metrics oriented in one way or the other I think where the

(03:37) difference might be is that a gross PM is close to uh C folks in that they’re usually working on Commercial metrics right they’re really caring about um the commercial kpis like I don’t know Revenue conversions or something like that well let’s say a PM that’s developing a feature that might not be directly connected to any of the p&l um

(04:02) kind of they might be just caring about yeah how many people use this or how long they stayed on the page or use this feature there could be metrics that are not exactly commercial right so I think that’s the biggest difference and some PM work for sure like platform PMS might not really care about many metrics they

(04:21) might have some kpis but um gross BMS are definitely having usually have some some sort of commercial metric in mind that they are working on to improve yeah all also I will bet that you accidentally fell into what you were doing too so as far as like cro experimentation growth PM whatever you want to call it how did

(04:44) you start this how did you get on this path and yeah like what can someone who’s listening to this do to kind of follow in your footsteps as well yeah sure so I’ve been doing uh product management for quite a while I started in 2011 and I’ve done like a lot of very different companies both B2B and b2c and

(05:06) very different business models and I think I was at the time working I think for like a Neo Bank you know and um I was building like some very core features and it was fairly complex right and usually very technical like you spend a lot of time with developers like really building these features and then

(05:27) after that I um thought that I want something different and I was um working with a company called Urban sports club which is very welln in Berlin and this one is a subscription service around Sports and I was responsible there for like user acquisition uh right so for the whole funnel and the journey and hom

(05:47) pages and the landing pages and the registration flow but also for like the um the prices and the packaging and the value proposition all that right and um I I felt like this is something I would like to do so I specifically went to find this kind of uh job and I was I knew a enough to get it right hi this is

(06:08) Romo Santiago from experiment Nation if you’d like to connect with hundreds of experimenters from around the world consider joining our slack Channel you can find the link in the description now back to the episode um and then from doing that eventually when I get the opportunity to do cro I thought well

(06:25) this is even further uh on this on this journey of working a lot with this kind of Concepts right like working way more with data like optimizing Journeys optimizing flows and things like that so um I guess if someone would like to go this way I would say that the first thing is to be really knowledgeable

(06:47) about the business model because I tend to see and there’s right now a lot of chat about it in the product management Community you know that a lot of product managers are not really that big business savvy and that they operate very far from the p&l of the company from real like commercial side of things

(07:04) and that they deliver features and they don’t really like know how these features are supposed to contribute to the business so I think knowing the business side of things is very important how your company is making money what is the what are the costs right where can you like improve things to to be improving that uh this

(07:24) knowledge I think is crucial right and then um it it definitely requires more knowledge around data and knowing your way through like analytical tools and being able to look at things and understand what they tell you like it’s great to have good um you know business analysts or data analysts working with you but to be

(07:44) truly effective I think you really need to be um fairly familiar with those tools and then yeah all these practices of like how to conduct user research how to conduct experiments this is all inv valuable I think to be doing um growth bming or c for that matter of course that’s like the core the core part of

(08:04) the job yeah right so um yeah I think you can go into this from many functions right but you need to of course learn those Concepts because they are Central to this uh to this job absolutely and we talk about this a lot as experimenters this curiosity and I I see that in your answer where you know you you were doing

(08:28) something and then you were looking at the full picture you weren’t just looking at how can I just funnel as many people to this one page as possible like how can I actually impact real metrics that drive some sort of measurable outcome and an important outcome did you ever do any sort of work with paid

(08:52) acquisition or just like very top of funnel work before you got into the more more of the conversion side this is a very good question and I will answer a little bit extra to that so um so no I personally didn’t work ever worked at marketing but even from the very first uh PM jobs that I got they were in some way connected because it

(09:19) was direct to Consumer brands that did paid marketing and so I was well aware of the concepts you know and how it works and then it’s only later that I realized that it’s intrisically connected you know to this whole thing that you can’t just ignore those parts of the funnel that are not um you know

(09:37) that you’re not directly responsible for you you really need to look holistically and I think I was at some point writing an article trying to explain what’s the difference between gross pming and c and I spent a whole day just to in the end to write actually there is not there are there is not much difference if we’re

(09:55) speaking about good like quality right because I think that’s the that’s the real kind of practical difference is that as a growth PM you have to look at things holistically you have to understand the whole journey and to either yourself improve all of it or ensure that people that are responsible are connected talking to each other

(10:17) communicating and participating in in all this and only then it actually works right because you can’t just ignore that part um oh that’s after registration so it’s another team I not going to touch it and this is pre this is marketing it’s not my job then it’s just like not working yeah and grow BM supposed to be

(10:36) either working on it or connecting people that do it while cro folks some at least right sometimes okay this is just this page just this landing page that we’re improving and that’s it we don’t care about anything else then yeah then there is a big difference yeah when we’re speaking of like real good quality

(10:54) CR oh yeah then it’s like it’s super close it’s all the same thing you can’t ignore you know marketing you can’t ignore what happens later you really have to be optimizing having this holistic view yes yes I’ve I’ve dealt with this exact issue so many times especially with web apps where you know you have the marketing team and you have

(11:21) the product team they are totally separate from each other you have maybe a few people in the leadership team who connect with each other but you have the marketing team who’s like okay I can send all this traffic your way I can run all these ads that perform but I can’t influence what’s going on in the web app

(11:42) that’s for the product team so you have this one half of the team that feels like their hands are tied they they can’t influence much all they can do is influence that first step and then you probably have the product team who’s like well maybe marketing shouldn’t be funneling all this shitty traffic our

(11:59) way if it doesn’t perform have you encountered this and how do you move past this if you have yeah sure uh yeah definitely happened right and interestingly enough it happens sometimes in both small and big orgs right uh still people could be sitting at the same floor and still not talk to each other right yeah so like usually

(12:23) when I’ve dealt with I usually was through just facilitating the actual conversation or I was one of the sides responsible and I was a good communicator enough to actually beine this connection but um recently I was just thinking a lot about this this thing and connecting it to this chat that I or this these talks in

(12:48) the in the product community that I I mentioned it actually even happens now in the ux like in designer community and even in research uh user research Community where everyone is saying like we all of us should be much closer to p&l and Commercial metrics and be kind of commercially minded because otherwise

(13:05) you can’t explain why are you even you know why you should exist in this company and people are like fearful for their jobs you know their layoffs and of course if you’re if you can’t explain well how is your activities how are your activities making money for the company then sure you you um you can get scared

(13:22) about it and so this is what I was thinking that could kind of breach these silos is that when you when all of the teams have some commercial goals and know how they contribute to it but we know that you can’t really get it without others right yeah you can’t just do your stuff and then say well we earned money because first the like

(13:49) users or customers should be coming from sales or marketing and then something happens later down the road so I think whenever everyone has like this sort of the commercial goals could be this thread that sort of connects all these teams and where everyone finally understands well okay we can’t really

(14:07) make this happen without everyone else right and if we want to reach our goals we have to like somehow start working with those guys and and those over there and um I think this is this is the way I haven’t done it yet but it’s more of a theory it’s a it’s a hypothesis of mine that that I’m piecing together look at

(14:27) all these like scattered you know scattered pieces of information and it’s it’s such a unnatural almost talent that you have to have in a position like yours where you have to be able to take the the agendas and the needs of all of these different people and oftentimes those agendas and those needs are competing but you still

(14:50) have to be able to find that like common goal that Common Thread that makes everyone like like be on board with with what you’re trying to do ultimately getting everyone to yeah be around the same shared goal and if it’s not uh you know if it’s not a financial success of your company in securing everyone’s

(15:10) salaries then you know what could be what’s more um like what’s the incentive often times yeah you want everyone to look good too and I don’t know about you but for me the thing that I found most effective to Rally marketing and product all of these other different teams together is as soon as I show them what

(15:31) the customer is saying what the user is saying what the frustrated visitor is saying that’s when I’ve noticed things start to click it’s pulling out the quotes from research it’s showing the heat map the screen recordings have you found that to be particularly effective uh in a way of course I mean the best way to make someone your friend

(15:55) is to clear show them how you generate value for them how you can help right so yeah of course this I think sort of already veers into uh into a different area of our of our discussion right the difference still a difference between C and and product managers uh and how they can collaborate with each other but I

(16:17) think there is a lot of quite quite a lot of misunderstanding of like who does what you know and what exactly are are are those guys are doing and usually everyone’s just so stuck in their jobs and like overwhelmed and stretched that you just don’t have like time or mental capacity to really figure out what this

(16:33) person even is talking about yes right so I think being like really transparent somehow concise right and also understanding way better what this other person might care about and bringing that exact thing I think yeah should help quite a bit yeah how do c better work work with PMS this is something that I’ve always struggled

(17:00) with personally I’ve never really struggled with designers or performance marketers but as soon as I get in front of the product team I don’t know what it is this is where I struggle how how do you get better at that sure well I think the C might get quite a few things wrong about the PMS right there usually what

(17:22) people Miss is this like sheer complexity of this job like everyone’s job is complex but so far I haven’t met many PMS that are not constantly like burnt out uh completely over stretched and and just like uh hating their life to be fair yeah um right it’s most most of the people I’ve met in and I worked in many product

(17:43) teams were like that it’s sort of bad but also it’s just it is what it is so very often what what I guess SOS might be might be missing is this whole like Forest of of blockers that like your your typical PM is facing every day to just do their job when um when I started doing C it was so liberating it

(18:06) was insane you know because you just you have and we were doing like the D manipulation you over optimizely you can do like yeah it is there are limitations but generally what it’s possible you can just do it you don’t need anyone you need your frontend developer to just do it most of the time and if someone like

(18:27) some stakeholders may be saying oh are you sure what about this you’re like hey it’s just an experiment you know we’ll shut it down in two weeks anyway yeah so H who cares and I had a great PM when I started doing it who was basically covering all my all my stuff you know he was always just saying exactly that to

(18:44) all the stakeholders but that’s not always like this right and the PMS then constantly face all things about like legal and customer support and maybe marketing and other stakeholders constantly nagging asking or saying no you can’t do this because you will break this workflow for us or you will change

(19:02) have you considered this so I think for the SI to understand that our jobs very often like the complexity lays in a different place usually right that yeah this person that you’re coming and and trying to like I don’t know get something to happen is most probably just facing a whole load of issues and

(19:23) unless you’re clearly showing you know how you are helping with this that you’re doing not something for you you’re actually doing something for them yes it’s sometimes very hard for them to justify you know U PMS are very often viewed as like a Gatekeepers you know oh person that just says no to everyone yes

(19:44) um again I I think like so many PMS are really aspiring to be these people from like Marty kagan’s books but the reality is very often just tells you that it’s impossible right and like there are so many people that would like to do way more user research and experiment you know and and like really Drive value and

(20:06) do impact but then every day you’re just churning through insane amount of inbound requests and people asking and then stakeholders demanding something to happen and delivery deadlines and Technical complications things like that so yes yeah I think that like if you can remove as much of that for the PM you

(20:27) working with right to think for yourself or maybe even to reach out yourself to some of those stakeholders and figure out okay could there be potential questions let’s say about our test that you need the product team to run and you figure this out in advance and you come and you say hey I already checked with

(20:45) this person this person that person they’re like we figured it out it’s all sorted you don’t have to do anything right that this really increases your chances uh of the respective pm saying oh you did this cool thing they would probably cry in the evening you know like yes someone someone did something

(21:02) nice for me totally I I’ve met so many PMS in my time and like they are some of the most miserable people that I’ve met not because they’re just miserable by default but because they have all these pressures and demands from all these different directions and this is actually a very similar conversation to

(21:23) an episode that we recorded on this channel like two weeks AO go but it was with uh a customer support lead and it’s a lot of similar themes here where it’s like the cro or the experimenter can help by providing information uh just lifting some weight off of their other team members shoulders and I I would like to carry that forward

(21:48) into my practice when I’m working with PMS because I know that there are a lot of constraints there are a lot of just pressures that I don’t see and I can definitely support with if I was just involved so is it fair to say that the experimenter or the cro they have a responsibility to inject themselves into

(22:08) the conversation I wouldn’t say it’s a responsibility right it would definitely help for sure right because to be fair like very often C is stuck in more like not stuck but placed in the marketing org right and might be viewed like who are you and what are you doing here you know by the product team it really

(22:28) depends on the company but to at least reach out and show that hey I’m willing to understand much better what’s happening on your side and to really kind of prioritize and tailor some of my work at least yes to be very helpful for you folks right yes and that you do some proactive steps to actually get there

(22:46) this would really help right so if you I guess if you really want to be good and in your org the effectiveness of your job depends on your collabor ation with the product team then yes it is your responsibility yes right because again remembering that this other this PM they might know that okay that’s maybe also

(23:06) their responsibility but they just that’s just one out of like a 100 and so they might just not have the energy to actually do it yeah absolutely so then it sounds like you went from pm to cro how do you do the opposite how do you go from cro to PM I don’t know why someone would want to because being a PM is very difficult

(23:28) but if someone wanted to look I can I can find quite a few reasons to be fair uh there are downsides to to being a s o uh right so like one of the few things that I that I was wrangling with when I started doing C what first was that well I don’t call the all the shots anymore right I actually had to ask itm hey can

(23:51) we do this what do we think about that could you ask the dev te maybe help us with this one thing back in the day when I was a PM or and I wanted to do an experiment I could just tell my Dev team that or set the priorities in a way where we would just do it right um so I think BMS just have a much broader also

(24:10) field of Leverage and you know things where you can just make things happen in comparison with with a c sometimes again this is something that kind of separates the grow bming from Z is because growth PM is supposed to be able to do deeper changes right sometimes you might be messing with back end do some full stack

(24:34) tests you know do deeper changes if they are necessary while your normal cro job would not expect this to happen right so there are benefits uh to go there right um if you’re willing to do so um well I mean I think working uh working as a c already covers quite a lot of ground right so this whole area about like user

(24:58) research understanding your customers about data understanding like metrics and Commercial side of things and business models this whole thing already covered so I think what’s lacking in this case is a much better I guess technical knowledge kind of because again your things that you are will be working with as a PM could get

(25:22) very technical very fast right you might have to start like writing tickets for your de team about certain like backend Logics and features how things should be working is believe me it’s not sometimes like much more complex of course than what happens on the on the front end or the complexity is just different right

(25:42) so you’d have to learn about that as well unfortunately uh a lot of the PM job um right now is still project management right so you literally kind of push things through and make things to get delivered and those are not not you know an experiment that takes three days to deliver those could be months

(26:00) and months worth of uh development right so it’s a challenge and I think this is also something to learn like okay well how do you collaborate with a big team of developers and QA people and how to you make certain they understand like where we’re going how to do it right there is way more stakeholder management

(26:19) of course so yeah I think this side of things if you can um kind of learn more about it cover it then you’re good to go awesome well I feel enlightened I hope that anyone who’s listening to this also feels enlightened and seriously it’s there’s just so many different things to consider there’s so many different ways

(26:41) that you can carve this path for yourself deciding which direction you do want to go into so I really appreciate you sharing what worked for you maybe what didn’t work for you is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners about how they can go about either working better with PMS or

(26:57) become one themselves um sure I mean to be fair again knowing that our listeners are likely to be some of the cro folk right that for me like I started doing cro and I liked it so much uh I really enjoy and still enjoy doing it right but on the other hand it felt weird to abandon like 10 years of product

(27:21) management and like entirely just not do this anymore so so when I discovered that there there is this specification you know that is going on a little bit kind of within the product management industry that you could just more specialize as a gross PM right and so you still apply majority of what you do

(27:43) in cro but then also you can apply your expertise if you were a PM before or if that’s something that you would like to learn and kind of develop into as a just C manager right then you can do that uh because very often like I would like to run experiments that are just impossible to do with the tools available right if

(28:04) it would be officially growth PM I could do them right I would have a developers and stuff so you could do more interesting stuff so I think this opportunity uh or this possibility to just kind of be a product manager but sort of say hey I’m doing growth right so this is what I’m expect to be doing if that’s like close to what you want me

(28:28) to be doing then you just you go there so I think this really makes it very appealing or could make it very appealing to a lot of the to a lot of sofol that’s great thank you I saved the heartest questions for last so get ready okay number one who is your cro hero you weren’t expecting this one were

(28:54) you yeah man I like this might sound a bit kind of sus I don’t know but I’m I really I really maybe not SAS okay maybe I didn’t use the the right word but I like to be fair I actually really appreciate Ronnie kave like he just like consistently there on LinkedIn calling out BS and like linking materials you know and

(29:22) dissecting some of the stuff there it’s really cool I think it’s really important work he’s doing so I I really I don’t know I don’t know you can call him Jus AO I you know he was in experimentation for so long but I think yeah at as of now he’s he’s really great it’s funny that you mentioned that I

(29:45) have like a personal cro Milestone it’s it’s unspoken it’s my first Ronnie kohve tear down I the first time that he ever will on a post post of mine will be a day that I go out to celebrate cuz it just will open up my exposure to other people and a broader audience so yeah I’m fine with it but to be fair there

(30:07) there are like really a lot of great folk um it’s hard to choose so uh totally this was the first one that I that I thought about totally totally and um what is the first experiment that you’ve ever run can you remember your first ooh yeah actually uh I wasn’t a c uh person back then I was a product

(30:31) manager but I had a c person in my team and I really wanted to to kind of do more of this so um it was a very simple one we um it was like a registration SL subscription funnel for for a subscription service and we were asking like this address in the end and it was completely unnecessary at that place and

(30:57) like naturally I was like isn’t more Fields kind of prevents people from converting let’s remove them so we did it improved nothing like literally flat which is when I yeah which is when I learned that well when it’s a third step of conversion the intent of the person is high enough to ignore these couple of extra lines it’s not an effort

(31:22) for them anymore and at least in this part particular setup it just didn’t work at all and we only messed up someone else that really needed this address later yeah and they were like where’s the address they’re not the addresses they’re not coming in anymore I’m like oh yeah yeah so yeah well you tested it you found out and on that note

(31:41) what is the most surprising test result that you’ve encountered sure um well that was for like a marketplace where the nature of the products is fairly complex and um on the search result page we tried to kind of make the cards look a bit more structured and have like yeah have a better better structure and be less

(32:09) cluttered and so we tried to work with like the some of the product information that was there on the card and it was just like there with commas you know and we tried to put it in tags we had it was a test was like four variations I think we had to like test divide them by like these dots and then one even where you could like scroll

(32:31) through MH and we thought well this like visually this looks much better and it like tanked hard like everything it was red ocean I thought there was a bug there’s something wrong with tracking it just can’t go minus 10% on literally everything we checked triple checked QA reran the test and it was just as red as

(32:52) the first time and we were really at a loss to to understand why is this happening um so yeah that was probably the most surprising not very positive test but we were surprised indeed yes I’ve had many of those I’ve also had the classic oh my gosh it’s not performing well there’s got to be a bug immediately

(33:15) diving into screen recordings trying to see like oh my gosh did it break did something go wrong um sometimes our ideas are just not that great and we have to accept it yeah doing Sero work uh work really humbled me a lot yes I was going to say the exact same thing that’s for sure from my pming times I would more often

(33:36) say yeah I know exactly how this supposed to work yes now I just never say this like because I don’t I exactly clearly don’t exactly well I think that’s a great thing lastly hardest question of all of them what do you have going on that you want our listeners to know about yeah sure uh to be fair I don’t have that much or any specific

(34:00) thing more that um yeah that I’m doing this right now as an independent uh consultant and I’m just happy to for anyone who needs or wants to start experimenting or to improve their current experimentation program yeah to reach out and I would be happy to talk to them to look at their um ongoing things and maybe there’s um a click and

(34:21) a match and we could do some great things together great and how how can our listeners reach you sure you can find me on LinkedIn by my name or maybe we will add a a URL or otherwise yeah I think LinkedIn is the best awesome well link will be in the show notes but thank you so much for joining us sharing what

(34:43) you learned along the way some of your mistakes learnings lessons all of that good stuff and uh yeah I hope uh I hope to see you again on this show in the future Tim absolutely Tracy it was a pleasure really nice questions and very fun talking with you thank you awesome thank you hi this is Romo Santiago from

(35:01) experiment Nation if you’d like to connect with hundreds of experimenters from around the world consider joining our slack Channel you can find the link in the description now back to the episode

If you liked this post, sign up for Experiment Nation’s newsletter to receive more great interviews like this, memes, editorials, and conference sessions in your inbox: https://bit.ly/3HOKCTK

---